Chocolate Chip Cookies

(Still shot from a Nestle semi-sweet morsels commercial ca. 1989)

Chocolate chip cookies were my thing growing up. I knew nothing about the Toll House Inn, though in the days before Wikipedia, I did wonder why they were called Toll House cookies. Regardless of what they were called, I knew the Harvest Gold package of morsels was a foundation for aesthetic experimentation, for making people happy.  

Lamb and Freekeh... Whatever

It was going to be the Easter dish of my greatest Instagram fantasies. 

I was going to use Heather Ardnt Anderson’s lamb shank and farro recipe except I was going to give it more of a Levantine twist. I would replace the farro with freekeh, a smoked, unripe rubbed/cracked wheat popular in the Levant, North Africa, and Turkiye. And since I love chickpeas, I’d add those too, making it reminiscent of qidreh, the Palestinian lamb shank dish I’ve made for the last two Easters. Since the assortment of spices called for in the recipe was already part way there, I would swap them out for advieh e-polo (Persian rice seasoning—fresh ground myself). Plus I still had a cup or two of leftover frozen lamb stock to which I had originally added too much mastic (along with baharat, the levantine spice mixture). Adding frozen vegetable stock to meet the four cups called for in the recipe would dilute that lamb stock a bit but still give a hint of something otherworldly. The whole thing would be a glorious Levantine-Persian mash-up appropriate to the current geopolitical moment. 

Michelle's Oatmeal-Cranberry Chocolate Chip Cookies

 

I’m probably typical among GenXers in learning to bake via the Toll House cookies recipe on the back of the harvest yellow package of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips. I have a vague memory of my mom and I in our kitchen that seemed tiny even to my six-year-old self, her showing me how to crack eggs, measure flour, and spatula the cookies off our blotchy brown cookie sheet. But as with so many things when it came to my mother, I was left to my own devices soon afterward. Which has given my kitchen practice a bit of a FAFO flavor—making it all the more fun. 

“There is no room for imagination in cookery,” says Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables. “You have to follow the rules…” Ah, but once you know the rules, oh the scope for the imagination! And an ineffable but relatively quick sense of satisfaction at creating something delicious and maybe even beautiful with your own two hands.